Teaching Generation Z
Friday, August 12, 2005
The Magic Of RSS
Wow. Sitting here on a Friday afternoon at this three hour workshop with Yvonne @ tsof. There's only about four of us here who actually come from schools - quite a few attendees from tsof itself. The workshop is all about RSS and how we as educators might be able to harness its power to sort through the overwhelming resources of the Web. Now I know who Vonnie from SouthOz E-Learning is. Blogs are a very crucial part of this whole picture as that's where this whole Social Bookmarking aspect of RSS comes into play. She's shown us a Powerpoint that she already showed @ CEGSA State Conference this year. If I didn't have a knowledge base to go from, my head would be spinning right now from information overload. Now we are watching a future Flash movie about how the Web is evolving. Check it out @ http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic I'm too busy scribbling notes on my Pocket PC to really take it all in. I'll have to rewatch it to really take it all in.
Yvonne's talking a lot about the rss and xml labels for want of a better word. A big question for me right now when Yvonne is talking about Web 2.0 - Does that mean any website will be ignored in Web 2.0 if RSS is not a feature in the future?
We're looked at a couple of explanations of rss on the web but now we are going to look @ a Feedreader in action. Starting in http://www.edna.edna.au and I've done a search on Interactive Whiteboards. I then look through the hits for websites with an indicated RSS feed. We've planted that in the FeedReader and played around with that. A little bit later, Yvonne is taking us on a Web tour - looking @ Tagcloud, deli.cio.us, Technorati. After a while I've lost my concentration and start playing around with deli.cio.us, don't get me wrong, Yvonne has been a fantastic presenter but it is very late Friday afternoon, school issues from earlier in the day have been playing on my mind, so my mind drifts away for a bit. One classic moment towards the end when Yvonne is showing us her tags and does a search for "interactive whiteboards" and what pops up as the number one hit? My blog Teaching Generation Z! On that note, I've got a lot of social bookmarking to do..........